As an IT support professional, I serve multiple business and residential clients. One of my most frequent activities is the installation of operating systems (OS) on both Mac and Windows computers. As a result, I have tended to carry several bootable flash drives, each with an installer for a different operating system. These include various versions of macOS, Windows, and Linux distributions.
I recently decided that it would be much more efficient if I could fit all the different operating systems I need on a single flash drive. As a result, I created a drive that contained various versions of macOS and Windows 10. The drive was created on a Mac running macOS Big Sur, but it can be booted on a Mac or Windows computer. It can then be used to install macOS or Windows 10 on a Mac, or Windows 10 on a PC.
Read on to learn how to create a multi-OS installation flash drive using a Mac.
Flash Drive Preparation
The first stage of the process is to prepare the flash drive you are going to use by erasing and formatting it. The following are the required steps.
- Select utilities in Discoverer and open disk utility.
- Plug in your flash drive and make sure that show all devices is marked on the View menu in disk utility.
- You should see your flash drive listed External in the left pane of disk utility. Click on it and then click on Delete.
- Give the record a Name (I have called it Operating systems) and select Mac OS Extended (Journaled) As the Format and GUID Partition Map As the Scheme.
- Click Delete.
- When the deletion process is complete, click Made.
Write the first version of macOS to the flash drive
You are now ready to write your first macOS installer to the flash drive. Let’s start with the most recent version, which is macOS Big Sur.
The first step is to download the macOS Big Sur installer. Apple has made it pretty easy, and this page contains links to download all recent versions of macOS, along with instructions on how to create a single bootable installer. just click macOS Great South under the heading Download macOS. This will take you to the app store where you simply click on GET. After a few seconds, you will be asked if you are sure you want to download macOS Big Sur and you should click Discharge.
After the download is complete, you can dismiss any attempt to start the macOS installation. The important thing is that the installer has already been downloaded to your Applications file. Is called Install macOS Big Sur.
To write the installer to the desired partition on your flash drive, open Terminal What will you find in it? utilities in Discoverer. Then type the following command.
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Big\ Sur.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/OperatingSystems
This command will be different if you are writing a version other than Big Sur and you need to check the exact syntax under the heading Use the “createinstallmedia” command in Terminal on the How to create a bootable installer for macOS page. The other component that may be different will be the name of the volume after /Volumes which in my case is Operating systems.
after pressing get into You will be prompted for the administrator password. You will then need to confirm that you want to continue and the operation will continue. This will take some time, depending on the speed of your flash drive, and you will see progress from 0 to 100% as files are copied to the drive.
You now have a bootable flash drive that contains the installer for macOS Big Sur. You are ready to proceed with adding additional macOS installers to the drive.
drive partition
First you need to partition the drive.
To return to Disk Utility and click on your flash drive in the left side panel. You will see that under the drive name you now have the name of your first volume which is Install macOS Big Sur.
Click Split and you will be presented with the partition window. Within this window, you can define the partitions you need, along with their sizes.
For now, let’s create an extra partition, which we’ll use for the macOS Catalina installer.
Click on the + to create an additional partition and then give it a Name. He Format It should be Mac OS Extended (Journaled) as before, and a Size 12 GB should be adequate.
Click Apply when ready and then confirm by clicking Split in the next window. The operation will take some time and then you will be presented with a window informing that the operation was successful. Click Made to close the window.
You can now download the installer for macOS Catalina in the same way as for Big Sur. Then go back to Terminal and type a command similar to the one used for Big Sur, but changing the name of the installer and the name of the destination volume. In this case, it would be the following command.
sudo /Applications/Install\ macOS\ Catalina.app/Contents/Resources/createinstallmedia –volume /Volumes/macOSCatalina
Again, enter your administrator password, confirm that you want to continue, and the operation will continue.
You now have a bootable flash drive with two partitions containing installers for different versions of macOS. You can then proceed with the process of creating new partitions, downloading the desired installers and writing them to the flash drive. Apple provides instructions for versions dating back to OS X El Capitan and it’s unlikely you’ll need a version earlier than this unless you’re working with a very old Mac.
Add a Windows 10 partition
We will now add a Windows 10 installer partition to the drive.
To return to disk utilityclick on your flash drive and select Split one more time. This time add a partition called windows10formatted MS-DOS (FAT) and size 8 GB.
Click Apply and then Split like before.
Now you need to download a Windows 10 ISO file (installer) from Microsoft. You can do this by visiting its Download Windows Disc Image (ISO File) page. For the purposes of this guide, I will assume that you are downloading the 64-bit International English version. Once you have downloaded the file, make a note of its full name on your downloads file. Then go back to Terminal and type the following command to mount the downloaded ISO file.
hdiutil mount ~/Downloads/
then open disk utility and write down the name of the disk image you just created, under disk images.
Now you have to go back to Terminal and type the following command.
rsync -avh –progress –exclude=sources/install.wim /Volumes//* /Volumes/W10
Now you need to install a package management tool called Homebrew. To do this, use the following command in Terminal.
/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install.sh)”
You will need to enter your administrator password and confirm the operation. Once it has been installed, type the following command.
brew install wimlib
Finally, enter the following command to write the Windows 10 installer to the Windows partition on the flash drive.
wimlib-imagex split /Volumes//sources/install.wim /Volumes/W10/sources/install.swm 3800
Installers test
To test that your flash drive is working properly, first turn off the computer. Then start the computer with the flash drive connected and hold down the key option key when it starts. After a short time, you should see all the boot options available to you. First it will be the hard drive of your Mac, and then you will see each version of the macOS installer that you have installed on the flash drive, and also the Windows installer, which has the name, EFI boot. Clicking on any of these will launch the corresponding installer, allowing you to continue installing that operating system.
Conclusion
As an IT support professional, having multiple macOS installers, along with a Windows 10 installer, on the same flash drive is invaluable. Although we created the drive using a Mac, the drive can also be used to install Windows 10 on a Windows computer.
Gone are the days of having to carry around multiple USB flash drives.
Categories: How to
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